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The term show trial is a pejorative description of
a type of highly public trial. The term
was first recorded in the 1930s. There is a strong connotation that
the judicial authorities have already
determined the guilt of the defendant and that the actual trial has as its
only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public
as an impressive example and as a warning. Show trials tend to be
retributive rather than correctionaljustice.

Such trials can exhibit scant regard for the niceties of jurisprudence and even for the letter of the
law. Defendants have little real opportunity to justify themselves:
they have often signed statements under duress and/or suffered
torture prior to appearing in the
court-room.

Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc show trials

Moscow Trials

The authorities staged the actual trials meticulously. If
defendants refused to "cooperate", i.e., to admit guilt for their
alleged and mostly fabricated crimes, they did not go on public
trial, but suffered execution nonetheless. This happened, for
example during the prosecution of the so-called "Labour Peasant Party" (Трудовая
Крестьянская Партия), a party invented by NKVD,
which, in particular, assigned the notable economist Alexander Chayanov to it.

Eastern Bloc party show trials

Following some dissent within ruling communist parties throughout the Eastern Bloc, especially after the 1948
Tito-Stalin split, several party
purges occurred, with several hundred thousand
members purged in several countries. In addition to rank-and-file
member purges, prominent communists were purged, with some
subjected to public show trials. These were more likely to be
instigated, and sometimes orchestrated, by the Kremlin or even Stalin
himself, as he had done in the earlier Moscow Trials.

Such high ranking party show trials included those of Koçi Xoxe in Albania and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, who were purged
and arrested. After Kostov was executed, Bulgarian leaders sent
Stalin a telegram thanking him for the help. In Romania, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu,
Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca were arrested, with Pătrăşcanu being
executed. Stalin's NKVD emissary coordinated with Hungarian General
Secretary Mátyás Rákosi
and his ÁVH head the way the show trial of
Hungarian Foreign Minister László
Rajk should go, and he was later executed. The Rajk trials led
Moscow to warn Czechoslovakia's parties that enemy agents had
penetrated high into party ranks, and when a puzzled Rudolf Slánský and Klement Gottwald inquired what they could
do, Stalin's NKVD agents arrived to help prepare subsequent trials.
The Czechoslovakian party subsequently arrested Slánský himself,
Vladimír Clementis, Ladislav
Novomeský and Gustáv Husák
(Clementis was later executed). Slánský and eleven others were
convicted together of being
"Trotskyist-zionist-titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors" in one
series of show trials, after which they were executed and their
ashes were mixed with material being used to fill roads on the
outskirts of Prague. By the time of the Slánský trials, the Kremlin
had been arguing that Israel, like Yugoslavia, had bitten the
Soviet hand that had fed it, and thus the trials took an overtly
anti-Semitic tone, with eleven of the fourteen defendants tried
with Slánský being Jewish.

The Soviets generally directed show trial methods throughout the
Eastern Bloc, including a procedure in
which confessions and evidence from leading witnesses could be
extracted by any means, including threatening to torture the
witnesses’ wives and children. The higher ranking the party member,
generally the more harsh the torture that was inflicted upon him.
For the show trial of Hungarian Interior Minister János Kádár, who one year earlier
had attempted to force a confession of Rajk in his show trial,
regarding "Vladimir" the questioner of Kádár:

The
evidence was often not just non-existent but absurd, with Hungarian
George Paloczi-Horváth’s party interrogators delightedly exclaiming
"We knew all the time—we have it here in writing—that you met
professor Szentgyörgyi not in Istanbul, but in
Constantinople." In another case, the Hungarian ÁVH secret police also condemned another party
member as a Nazi accomplice with a document that had actually been
previously displayed in glass cabinet of the Institute of the
Working Class Movement as an example of a Gestapo forgery. The
trials themselves were "shows", with each participant having to
learn a script and conduct repeated rehearsals before the
performance. In the Slánský trial, when the judge skipped one of
the scripted questions, the better-rehearsed Slánský answered the
one which should have been asked.

Nuremberg Trials

British jurist F.J.P. Veale implied , in his book "Advance to
Barbarism" that the 1946 Nuremberg Trials of Nazi leaders amounted to a
form of show trial, as the judgments were not rendered by a
disinterested party, which is a key element of independent judicial
integrity. Others have disputed this characterization ,
noting that the forms of due process were observed, the trials were
open to the public, and that some of the Nuremberg defendants were
acquitted or were convicted of lesser charges than sought by the
prosecution.